Artemis Invaded (10 page)

“Come on,” she said to Sand Shadow. “Let's get Griffin and Terrell.”

*   *   *

If there was one thing worse than canoeing beneath toothy stalactites in pitch darkness, it was being pulled beneath the same. After consultation with Sand Shadow, Adara had decided that the ledge that ringed the cavern was too incomplete and too slippery for human travel.

“It might have been intended for such once,” she said, “but those gaps speak of someone deliberately blowing holes. We'll rig a raft. I'll pull you and Terrell across on it.”

The hastily constructed raft floated, but it also leaked. Both men arrived on the gravel beach wet and cold. Terrell, with a factotum's foresight, had anticipated this and had insisted that a duffle packed with changes of clothes join Adara in the canoe. The duffle also contained candle lanterns, matches, rope, chalk, and some other provisions.

When the men had dried off and changed their clothing, Adara led them to where she had found a possible door, although before their stay with the Old One in his Sanctum she would have had trouble thinking of a door as something without either hinges or handle. This “door” looked like nothing so much as a few lines traced on the wall. Leaving Terrell and Griffin with all but one of the candles, Adara went to see what else she could find.

By the time she returned with the news that she had located three other places where there might be doors—although all were shut and she couldn't find any way to open them—Griffin had puzzled through how to open the first door.

“At least I think I have,” he admitted. “The release system doesn't look terribly different from the door into the crew quarters at the Sanctum. I waited to try the levers until you were here, since it's likely to be dark on the other side.”

Adara nodded. “Good idea. Go on.”

Griffin did so, shifting this rod, moving that one, but when he pushed down a final time, the clunking sound that indicated hidden locks had been released didn't follow.

“It feels,” Griffin said, pressing down again, “as if it is jammed. It's possible the lock was broken—either over time or to prevent entry.”

“Possible,” Terrell said, but he looked thoughtful. Griffin recognized the expression and waited for Terrell to say more, but all the factotum added was, “Let's try the other doors.”

They did. Two were constructed in such a fashion that Griffin was willing to bet that they had never been intended to be opened from this side. The final one was a small access hatch and penetrated only a hand-span deep. Griffin studied the neat array of rings and lines that—if the theories he'd read were correct—represented the most sophisticated of the ancient technologies. Although they looked like nothing much more than a child's drawing, the theory was that each figure held within it complex routines condensed and ready to be activated at the correct command.

Terrell stepped beside Griffin so that his candle could join Griffin's in illuminating the space. “What's this?” he asked, reaching and picking up the only thing that wasn't a flat drawing—a curving piece of some bright material that rested on the edge of the compartment. It was a pretty thing, a shining, glimmering spiral that would have made a very attractive pendant.

“I have no idea,” Griffin said, “but I'm sure I've seen the like and not long ago.”

Terrell mimed slapping himself on his forehead. “I remember! There was something like this in with the bodies we found—well, with two of them, at least. Different colors, though. This one is golden topaz. The other two were dark green and orange-red.”

Adara joined them. “I remember. We thought they might be jewelry of some sort. The other two are pretty, but I like this one best. It's nearly the same color as my eyes.”

“Your eyes are darker,” Terrell replied in a caressing tone, “and more mysterious.”

Griffin wanted to kick him. “Earlier, we dismissed what we found as jewelry, but somehow I doubt someone left a pendant here in an access cabinet.”

“The owner might have taken it off so it wouldn't get damaged while he was working on something…” Terrell began, then shook his head. “No. I agree. We were wrong. This is something more important, maybe a tool of some sort.”

Again, Griffin caught a hint of that thoughtful expression, but he didn't press Terrell to speak, trusting he would when he'd worked through his idea.

“If this is a tool,” Adara said, “so are the others. Did either of you bring the artifacts with you?”

Griffin nodded. “I didn't want to leave the really interesting stuff behind. I kept imagining a squirrel or raven carrying it off, deciding they were lunch. I didn't take all the buttons and fasteners, but I'm sure I brought the pendants.”

After Griffin extracted the green and orange-red pendants from the bundle he'd carried close to his skin, they examined them by candlelight.

“I hadn't thought about it before, but they have slightly different shapes,” Terrell said. “They're all spirals but, look … The topaz one is rounded, the green one is triangular, and the orange-red one is squared.”

Adara was twirling the golden topaz artifact so that it caught the candlelight. Griffin wondered if she fancied it for herself. He imagined how the ornament would look resting against her tanned skin, just above the twin rounds of her breasts. He decided it would look very good indeed.

Adara's words, however, showed that her thoughts were far from personal adornment. “You two might have trouble seeing the detail in this weak light, but when you look closely, you'll see that the reason these sparkle is that they're made from tiny crystals. They remind me of sweet ice, a candy Bruin would make for Winterfest by soaking a bit of string in a sugar solution. These crystals are much, much smaller and with the candy you could see the string. These seem to have formed around nothing at all.”

“Maybe we should go outside and examine them in sunlight,” Griffin suggested. “I wonder if there are others. I'd like to take a look.”

Adara shrugged. “If you don't mind getting wet and cold, I don't mind towing you. We certainly seem to have come up on a dead end here. We've found the doors, but we can't get them open.”

Terrell nodded. “Let's go out. There's something I want to check, too … Something I've been wondering about ever since Adara found those three clusters of artifacts.”

*   *   *

Once they were outside, Terrell hardly took time to change out of his damp clothing before making a beeline toward the location where they had found a skeleton but had not found one of the pendants.

“I've been bothered all along,” he said, to Adara and Griffin, “by why these bodies were separated from the rest. There's something too alike about their situation.”

Struggling to button his trousers, Griffin hurried after, his mind swirling through possibilities. “Alike … You mean how all of them were near large clusters of stones?”

“Yes! I know we agreed that those people might have taken shelter there, but why then didn't we find evidence of more than one person? You said the scraps we found—buttons and things—indicated one person, maybe two, but probably one.”

“Right.”

“We also concluded that the reason the bodies weren't found and buried, as were those in the temple, was because they were isolated.”

“Right again.”

“What,” Terrell said, coming to a halt by the cluster of boulders, “if those three people went to those places deliberately? What if they had the means to open a way into the cavern?”

Adara frowned. “Then why did the people wait in the temple? I thought we agreed it was built as misdirection, nothing more.”

“Maybe we'll find there is an opening,” Terrell said. He had begun to methodically search the surfaces of the clustered rocks. Griffin joined in. Without asking, he sensed what Terrell sought. “However, we only have legend to tell us that the people were hiding in the temple when they were slaughtered. Maybe they were waiting for something else and hid when they saw the enemy coming. Maybe those who came to bury the bodies assumed they had been hiding in the temple and had been forced out into the open by the attackers.”

“It would be a reasonable assumption,” Adara agreed, “if they didn't suspect there was anything else here.”

“I think,” Terrell said, “that these rocks hide some sort of mechanism, one that would enable emergency access. I think it took at least three keys to open it. I think we have two of those keys. If we're lucky, we'll find the third and with it…”

His voice trailed off as he slid his hand into a crevice between two of the larger rocks. He pulled, and one of the rocks moved as if it had been set on a pivot.

“There!” he said with satisfaction. “There! What did I tell you?”

Hidden in the space between the two rocks was an incision. Set into that was a glittering elongated oval spiral patterned in indigo-violet crystals. Griffin leaned to get a closer look.

“Fascinating. The pendant stretches out like a spring to fill the space. That explains the spiral shape.”

“Beautiful,” Adara said. “Now I'm torn as to whether I like this one or the topaz one better.” She grinned impishly at them. “Shall we go find what the other rocks hide?”

Terrell pushed the rock back into place. “There's a grip here, hidden so that it looks like a flaw in the rock. I felt something click when I pulled the rock out. I think the mechanism—whatever it is—won't work unless the rock is pushed back into place. See? When the rock is pushed in, that little jutting bit will press into the middle of the spiral.”

“Makes sense,” Griffin said, slogging through the tall grass toward the next site. “If they went to all this trouble to hide whatever it is we've found, then they wouldn't want it left open.”

Now that they knew what they were looking for, finding the second and third keyholes proved relatively easy. One took the dark green triangle, the other the orange-red square. However, inserting the keys and locking the mechanisms caused no miracles to happen. They inspected the temple and found it unchanged.

“It's closing in on evening,” Griffin said, “but, if Adara is willing, I'd like to go back into the cavern and see if anything has changed on the other shore.”

Adara grinned. “Willing? The only question is whether you two come with me or I go on my own. I've checked with Sand Shadow and she says the horses and Sam the Mule are doing well. She's killed a mountain deer and will share part with us. She's even put our haunch in a bag to chill in the pool near our camp, so the bugs won't get at it.”

“Then,” Griffin said, his heart pounding with excitement. “What's keeping us? Let's go!”

Interlude: Searching

Like swirling water

I trace the edges

Of nothing

 

5

Lights from the Sky

Adara had never claimed to have as good a sense of smell as Honeychild, not even as good as Sand Shadow, but it was her sense of smell that told her, even before they had slipped behind the rocky shelf that hid the entrance to the cavern, that something had changed. The air now reeked of rotting vegetation, mud, and slime, mingled with a suggestion of dead fish. When they passed through the opening into the cavern, they saw why.

“The water's gone!” Griffin exclaimed, holding his candle high. “Well, mostly gone … It's still draining away.”

Adara pointed. “And look … There's a path. I never even imagined it was there because the stalactites were so close to the surface of the water that I couldn't canoe through that area.”

“Whatever the surface is made from,” Terrell said, going to where the path began and kneeling to touch the surface, “may look like rock, but it isn't. There isn't a trace of slime or weed or even mud on the surface. The surface is already almost dry.”

“Do we trust ourselves to it?” Griffin asked.

Adara shrugged. “There's not enough water left for my canoe and certainly not for the raft. The ledge around the rim is even less inviting, since now you'd fall into that sludge, rather than into cold water. So it's either use the path or climb down and slog.”

“I vote ‘path,'” Terrell said. “I'd been wondering how the seegnur hoped to get to safety if the only way to the other shore was using small boats—and we saw no evidence that any were kept here.”

Griffin nodded, but he seemed uneasy. Adara didn't blame him. The engineering involved in what they had activated had her thinking of the seegnur as she had when she was a small child—godlike creators, makers of worlds—rather than the relatively understandable mortals whose quarters they had examined back at the Sanctum.

“I'll take point,” she said, “and warn you if anything seems unstable. I've let Sand Shadow know what we're doing. She's bringing her dinner closer so she'll be within contact range if anything goes wrong.”

The men followed without comment, first Griffin, then Terrell. With the indirect lighting from the candles carried by the men, Adara could see easily. Periodically, she looked down to assure herself that nothing remained other than fish that hadn't swum fast enough to get away when the water drained.

Once or twice, the huntress thought she saw human figures outlined in the mud and wondered. The lore contained tales of the armor the attackers had worn. That would survive even after the corpses within had rotted away. She decided not to mention what she had seen until she was sure. Time enough to come back and take a better look later. Griffin was easily distracted and certainly old suits of armor—presumably broken or they would not be down in the muck—offered neither threat nor help.

The path ended where the gravel beach curved up from beneath, showing the artificial barrier that had assured the shore staying in place all these centuries.